PREFACE V 



by incessantly reiterated arguments. From the very 

 beginning until the very end of its life clever people 

 proved over and over again almost to demonstration that 

 the colony ought not to exist ; and vital controversies 

 raged from i6ii to 1817 between settlers and non- 

 settlers, from 1662 to 1 7 14 between French and English, 

 from 1 7 63 to 1 904 once more between French and English, 

 from 1783 to September 19 10 — when this book was in 

 page-proof — between American citizens and the colonial 

 or Imperial authorities ; and of all stale unprofitable 

 things argument, proof, and controversy seem worst to 

 those who regard history as a tragic stage rather than as 

 a school of formal logic or a court of law. Historians 

 want their authorities to present characters and events, 

 such as those which Holinshed furnished to Shakespeare, 

 but three-fourths of the authorities on the history of 

 Newfoundland grind out interminable premisses and 

 conclusions in the style of Tidd's Practice. One-sided 

 statements of Claim, Defence, and Counter-Claim 

 casuistically and drearily confuted or confirmed one 

 another for three hund red years. Between 1675 and 1757 

 the very admirals and captains of the Royal Navy wrote 

 some fifty or a hundred annual answers to some fifty 

 or a hundred annual interrogatories, with that glib 

 sameness and definiteness which is only too familiar 

 to lawyers. It might therefore be feared that worse 

 than legal cobwebs would obscure the volumes in 

 which the history of Newfoundland is written. 



But another aspect of the same picture presents itself 

 to those who use their imagination. Controversy, after 

 all, was only the sign and symptom of the half-and-half 



